The ‘birth’ of political
ecology
Historical notes
The basics of political ecology:
• Political ecology assumes that there is a
dialectical unity between human beings and
their environments.
• This means that environmental problems are
shaped by social processes. These
processes can include:
– Political economy, e.g. relations of production and
class relations.
– Gender relations.
– The state and its institutions.
– International political relations, e.g. colonialism and
neo-colonialism.
– The architecture of knowledge, e.g. scientific and
technical modifications of the environment.
– Despite the variety of factors that influence
human/environmental relations, there is a chain of
causality operating between these relations.
How did political ecology begin?
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Historically, 3 factors have animated western thought
regarding the environment:
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Is the Earth a purposefully designed creation?
Have the climate and physical features of the Earth
influenced the moral and social character of individuals
and cultures?
In what ways have people altered the environment and
the face of the Earth?
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In the late nineteenth and early 20th centuries,
environmental and climatic determinism was an important
school of thought.
Criticized by Carl Sauer, who argued that climatic
determinism was really a justification for colonialism.
Shifted attention to the role of human interventions on the
environment and the geographical landscape.
The new science of ecology, based on a systems
approach to the interrelationship of biological organisms
also began to influence social science, while
functionalism in social science influenced the emergence
of ecology.
Cultural Ecology
• Originated in the theoretical and
empirical work of Julian Steward.
– Steward argued that functionalism needed
to be extended to include ‘humanenvironmental’ relations.
– Also argued that the adaptions through
which humans extracted energy from
nature were determinant of many others.
These were referred to as the cultural core,
and were often identified with a particular
technology.
• HUNTERS AND GATHERERS, SWIDDEN,
PASTORALISM, AGRICULTURE,
INDUSTRY=BAND, TRIBE, CHIEFDOM, STATE.
• Example: Richard Lee’s studies of the !Kung
San.
Roy Rappaport & Pigs for the Ancestors
• Saw ritual and redistributive feasting of the
Tsembaga in New Guinea as an ecological
‘thermometer.’
• The Tsembaga were engaged in swidden
cultivation with digging sticks, hoes and steel
axes.
• Ritual involves the uprooting of the rungbim
plant, which helps maintain an undegraded
environment…adjusts man-land rations,
facilitates trade, distributes local surpluses of
pig in the form of pork and assures people of
high quality protein when they most need it.
• Hence, redistribution maintains a sustainable
relationship between pigs, humans, and
tropical forest agriculture.
Critique of Cultural Ecology
• 1. Ignores the fact that most small-scale
societies are not isolated, but many have
been integrated into global flows of
commodities and labour since the colonial
period.
• 2. Cultural core seen as the institutions that
mediated the relation between humans and
the environment; but was this a causal or
merely a limiting relationship?
• 3. Cultural ecology also ignores differences
within societies, e.g. class, gender and social
organization.
• Discounts the meaning that participants hold
of their environmental and economic relations
and rituals, e.g. Marvin Harris and ‘cow
worship’ in Hindu India.
Critique of neo-Malthusian northern environmentalist
thought
• 1960s, 1970s, Club of Rome published a
number of studies that argued humanity was
reaching its ‘limits to growth’ and argued that
population increase was outstripping human
environmental resources.
• Saw environmental degradation in the Third
World as caused by over-use, irrational
management, and overstocking, all ultimately
due to overpopulation.
• Hardin’s Tragedy of the Commons Thesis:
blamed poor management and overstocking
of African pastoralists for increased
desertification.
– This was due to the fact that pastures were
‘common property’ resources. The solution was
privatization of pastures or state intervention.
Critique of neo-Malthusian thought
• Many anthropologists, sociologists and
geographers argued that this strain of
thought was ideological and
empirically unsubstantiated, e.g. that
‘common property’ societies had
complex rules of access and use.
• They also showed how examples of
ecological degradation was shaped by
social relations, economic constraints
and political structures.
• Examples: Seeds of Famine (on the
Sahel famine of 1968-74).
– Hecht’s analysis of the role of the Brazilian
state in the degradation of the Amazon
rainforest.
Examples of Early Political Ecology
• Bernard Neitschmann sought to understand
how the pressures of external market demand
for sea resources among the Miskito Indios of
Nicaragua.
– Miskito lived both by subsistence gardening and
fishing.
– Commercialization of turtle harvesting led to:
• Decline of subsistence crops.
• Indebtedness through traders.
• Instensification of turtle harvesting leading to the
decline of the resource, in order to repay debts.
• Grossman: introduction of commodity
production and exchange for external
markets, i.e. coffee and beef, conflicted with
subsistence production, even when land and
labour are in absolute surplus.
Insertion of Political Economy into
Ecological Studies
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O’Connor: dual contradiction of capitalism.
Dialectical unity between humans and nature, the latter is
shaped by relations of class, power, and state actions.
Importance of understanding relations of production, not
only the forces of production (cultural ecology).
Social relations of production include the control of land,
labour and inputs, patterns of surplus extraction and
decision-making authority in investments in land
improvements and are embedded in particular systems of
property rights.
Relations of production need to be understood:
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Locally
Regionally
Nationally
Internationally
• The problem of scale. Blaikie: Poverty and environmental
degradation are closely linked to social and spatial patterns of wealth
accumulation.
• Chains of causation: start from the rural producer in the South, then
analyze local relations of production. then regional and national
relations of production, the state and its strategies of accumulation,
and finally north/south relations and international politics.
Special Issue of Environment and Development
• Restated the political economy/ecology
approach and pointed to new
directions (1993):
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Importance of gender and environment.
Role of identity politics,
Critique of power (Foucault).
View of environment/human relations as
‘socially constructed’, including our views
of the environment and of nature.
– Critique of the dualism of human/nature
and nature/culture dichotomies:
• Seen to emerge with Descartes and the birth of
western science.